MISCELLANY.

A NARRATIVE

OF SOME EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES THAT HAPPENED MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS SINCE.

FEW places in our country have any traditions of moment associated with them, and of these few a very small proportion are the objects of superstitious awe. Here and there, however, you meet with a spot memorable for one of those terrible interpositions of Providence, which seem directly aimed to punish or prevent guilt. The state of religious belief in our country readiÎy adopts these solutions of the ways of Heaven, and the freedom with which the motives of the Ruler of all things for permitting a particular event to happen, is assigned, were it not for the profound sincerity and solemnity with which it is accompanied, might justly be thought daring and irreverent.

I knew one of those spots not many years since. It was in a kind of wild neglected pasture that stretched along the side of a hill worn into terraces by the paths of cattle and sheep. At one end, close to the skirt of a tall wood, was a circle of ground nearly level, in the middle of which was sunk a little hollow, four or five feet over, bordered with fragments of rock, and half surrounded by bushes. I often used to visit it, for it commanded a beautiful view of the surrounding mountains, the valley between, and the river which flowed through the valley. In the northeast the smoke-wreaths from the houses that stood unseen between the hills, rose as if proceeding directly from the ground, and the spire of the church looked as if planted in the midst of a green field. A little farther to the south the hills receded from each other, the meadows grew wider and wider, and the river came forth as if issuing from a chasm in the earth, and glided away, rejoicing, through the thick grass and occasional borderings of trees, till its course was lost to the sight.

I became the more fond of this little nook, as a kind of dread with which the neighbourhood regarded it, had caused it to be abandoned to me alone. The snow at the end of winter, whether from the natural warmth of the soil or the favorable exposure, was melted away here sooner than in the neighbouring fields, and the verdure was earlier and brighter. I found the fragments of

rock about the little hollow edged with the first flowers of spring. The blossoms of the liver-leaf and of the vernal saxifrage wagged their heads in the first soft winds of the season. A little later, the erythronium opened and glittered in the dew like a jewel of beaten gold for the ear of an Indian princess. I came hither in the summer to gather the black raspberry which ripened in the sun to an intense sweetness, and was never plucked save by myself and the birds that built their nests unscared on the neighbouring shrubs. I loved to sit here in the long days of June, and look out upon the valleys that lay in the deluge of light and heat, and watch the shadows of the clouds as they ran along the sides of the mountains. In autumn I found, on the alders and witch hazels, clusters of the wild grape which the schoolboy had left untouched. I knew well that some tradition of horror was connected with the place, but I cared not to inquire into its particulars, for I did not wish to mingle ideas of human suffering and guilt with those of the peace and innocence of nature.

At last the story was told me. One of those kind communicative beings who cannot bear that any body should remain ignorant of any thing concerning which it is in their power to afford information, one day insisted on my knowing the whole, and common courtesy obliged me to listen. I have committed his narrrative to writing, relating the circumstances in my own way.

At a little distance from the spot I have described, and near the foot of the hill, were to be seen at the time of which I am speaking, and probably are to be seen yet, the ruins of an old dwelling. A square hollow showed where the cellar had been, and the shape of the old sills on which the house was built was still discernible under the green turf by which they were overgrown. A patch of tansy and a few long-lived currant bushes marked the place of the garden, and hard by was an old well, filled up with loose stones. It is now more than twenty years since that habitation was abandoned and pulled down, and the place that was once noisy with the cries of domestic animals, the hum of household industry, and the accents of the human voice, now hears no other noise than that of the neighbouring brook leaping down its stony channel, and brawling all day long to the witchhopples and dwarf maples that overshadow it. Its last tenant, however, old Jacob Holmes, is still well remembered in those parts; a tall, spare, large-boned man, with a stooping figure, an ashy complexion, and thick, white, bushy eyebrows, under which a pair of grey eyes skulked in ambush, observing every thing, and themselves almost entirely screened from observation. He

lived in a neighbourhood of industrious farmers, but no one of them all prospered like him; his cattle always throve, his barns and granaries were crammed till they could hold no more with the abundance of his crops, he had the art of getting more work out of his laborers than any man in the whole country, and what was still more extraordinary, he was never known to be overreached in a bargain. On a quiet summer evening, as he sat at his window, and looked out upon his farın, just at the going down of the sun, his grey eyes would twinkle from their concealment with evident satisfaction as he beheld every where the signs of thrift, heavy oats, thick wheat, broad acres of Indian corn in rows of the darkest and healthiest green, sheep on well-browsed hills, and sleek kine coming home in the road with a white-haired boy and their own long shadows stalking behind them. In short, it was very evident that Holmes laid up money, and after this was once discovered there were frequently seen about him divers men of obsequious manners, who spoke in a low tone of voice. These were the people who wanted to borrow, and Holmes was not unwilling to lend on good security. But as ill luck would have it, he was never able to furnish the exact amount of money the borrower wanted, who was therefore obliged to take an old horse, a few bushels of corn, or a few loads of potatoes, to make up the sum required, a process which the sagacious old usurer found to be an easier and more profitable way of disposing of this kind of property than by sending it to market. The debt thus contracted was generally secured by a snug mortgage, which the creditor took care to foreclose in due time. In this way he saw his possessions gradually enlarging around him, meadow joined itself to meadow, and woodland was added to woodland, until at length he had rolled together a very considerable estate.

Among the miseries of the rich, not the least is their anxiety concerning what will become of their money after they are dead. In this country, and perhaps in others, one of two things very commonly happens to a man who has the good or ill fortune to be richer than his neighbours. Either he has a graceless son who squanders for him all he can lay hands on in his lifetime, and only waits for his last breath to begin squandering the rest; or else a wayward daughter, who falls in love with whom she pleases, marries him in spite of her honored father, and obliges the old gentleman, if he leaves his property to his own offspring, to leave it to be enjoyed by the very fellow whom of all the world he detests the most heartily. Old Holmes was under no apprehensions of the first of these misfortunes, for he had no sons; but he

was in very great danger of the latter, for his only daughter, who wrote her name Elizabeth, but was called by the neighbours Betsey, was one of the prettiest girls in the place, a bouncing, lively, rattling creature, with big, cheerful blue eyes, and cheeks as round and red as apples; kind-hearted in the main, but very much inclined to have her own way, and like the rest of her sex, somewhat fond of show and finery, or in other words, possessing a decided taste for the beautiful and elegant. I mean no disrespect to the ladies, for this passion does not perhaps naturally belong to their sex in a greater degree than to the other; it is only more unfolded and encouraged by the state of society in which we live. In a savage life there are no belles, there are only beaux. The warrior of the American wildernesses, with all his stoical virtues, and all his contempt for effeminacy, bedizens himself as gaily in his own peculiar fashion, as the proudest dame that flaunts in Broadway, to whom the very rainbow seems to have been made tributary, and who wears upon her head what you might take for the spoil of the fairest gardens of the earth.

Betsey's love for finery gave her father some trouble, and he could not help sometimes thinking that he should get rich faster without her. To do him justice, however, next to his money he loved his daughter; but his money was quiet and speechless, while the half-playful, half-chiding, and never discouraged importunities of his daughter enabled the weaker passion to triumph over the stronger whenever she was fully determined to have it so. So she was gratified with the gayest ribbons and finest silks worn in the place, and bonnets of the newest pattern from New York, a little behind the actual mode probably, but not the less a novelty in that remote neighbourhood. The old man's heart would sometimes fail him with the dread of approaching poverty, as he ran over the long account of what she had cost him. As was natural enough, however, he only placed a greater value on the object of all this expense, and resolved firmly that he would part with her upou no easy terms. "I will not," said he to himself, "give her away to the first beggarly fellow that asks for her, even though it should be Ned Hammond." This Ned Hammond, or as Betsey was generally pleased to call him, Edward, was a young neighbour of theirs, and the most favored of all the numerous suitors by whom the good-looking heiress was besieged. Edward, had little money, but he had the wealth of a good constitution, an agreeable figure, and an excellent temper. It was a pleasure to behold his strong limbs, his well spread chest, his manly countenance,

and the frank steady look of his eye, and to see him moving about with that unstudied ease, which belongs to those who possess the animal nature of our species in its perfection. He was the best leaper, the swiftest runner, the most dexterous swimmer, and the loudest laugher in the place. None of the young farmers excelled him at a mowing-match; none were readier to do a good office, or to retort a rustic joke. In short, no harm could be said of Edward, except that he was not rich; but as nobody was more cheerful than he, or wore a finer Sunday suit, it was perhaps no misfortune that he was not so. Betsey had preferred him to his rivals not because she loved him exactly, for her head was too full of more important matters to be seriously in love with any body, but because she thought it a matter of course that the handsomest and best dressed young man of the place was to be her husband. His poverty was no objection to him. "My father," thought the prudent young lady, "has enough for us both. I shall be able to teaze him out of a part of it, and Edward will know how to provide the rest."

Such was her arrangement; but her father looked on the young man with other eyes. He was not well pleased with seeing him so often about his premises, and accordingly demanded an explanation of his daughter, who very frankly and with great composure admitted that she liked him.

"But you don't intend to marry him?" said the old gentle

man.

"Indeed, father, I think I shall if he asks me."

"Then you shall have none of my property; I can tell you that."

"Then we will do without."

This was too much for the old gentleman; he could have endured that his paternal authority should be slighted, had the matter ended there; but the idea that his estate, which he had taken so much pains to acquire, and to which he owed all the consideration he received from his neighbours, should be spoken of with contempt, was more than he could bear. He therefore told his daughter in plain terms that he should turn Edward out of doors the first time he crossed his threshhold, a threat which she faithfully communicated to her lover that very evening, in a tête à tête of half an hour held at the tender season of twilight in the old gentleman's best parlour.

Shortly afterwards an incident took place which rendered him better satisfied with his daughter. One day he had occasion to go to the village, as it was called, consisting of some half dozen